Elevation as soccer's football

It takes only a half-mile run to reduce one of the country's top soccer players into a wheezing mass.

"Arrrrrrgh!" yells Carlos Tordoya, huffing as he spits a ball of phlegm.

"It hurts, doesn't it?" asks his trainer.

It does hurt, but imagine the agony for visiting soccer teams unaccustomed to playing matches, let alone sprinting a half-mile, in this Two-Miles-High City (and then some).

Soccer's governing body, FIFA, essentially banned international matches in La Paz, saying it was dangerous to play nearly 12,000 feet up in a city where hotels keep oxygen tanks on standby.

FIFA delayed the ban in May, but not before Bolivia has made a national crusade out of defending a home-field advantage greater than any Soldier Field blizzard.

President Evo Morales even played a soccer game on the 17,000-foot-high Chacaltaya glacier to show there are no ill effects.

In South America's poorest nation with one of its sorriest soccer traditions, citizens are clinging to the one factor that gives them a chance to compete with Brazil, Argentina and other powers.

"It's 50 percent the effects, but it's 50 percent psychological," said Tordoya, who plays for Bolivar, a pro team in La Paz. "You look into their eyes and can see that the altitude has gotten inside their heads."

The Bolivian national soccer team can use any help it can get. The team, which represents the country in international tournaments, has qualified only three times for 18 World Cups and never advanced past the first round.

What success they have achieved has come at Hernando Siles Stadium in La Paz. In 1993, Bolivia stunned Brazil there in a match that helped propel Bolivia into the 1994 World Cup (which Brazil eventually won).

Perhaps not coincidentally, Brazil has been the most outspoken critic of the high-altitude matches, complaining that they put their superstar players at risk. The great Pele said last month that the ban should remain in place "if we are thinking about equality and protecting the players."

FIFA had been considering a crackdown for a while, and last year it prohibited matches at altitudes above 9,022 feet unless players had an unfeasible week to acclimate. The ban would have also affected Cuzco, Peru, and Quito, Ecuador.

FIFA now says it will allow such high-altitude games until 2010, giving scientists a chance to study possible health risks.

The debate has become political dynamite in the Andes Mountains. Peru's president, Alan Garcia, complained that FIFA's decision was "Euro-centric."

But no one has championed the cause more passionately than Bolivia's president, a soccer fanatic who delights in playing pickup games with the press and even joined a La Paz club team recently.

Morales, a frequent U.S. critic who loves to play on nationalist sentiments, called FIFA's stance "soccer apartheid" and joined Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona for an exhibition match in La Paz to publicize Bolivia's stance.

The stunt on the glacier, with a bundled-up Morales trading shots with scientists in a mountain camp, was perhaps his biggest PR victory.

With Bolivia battling stubborn poverty and occasionally violent political protests, Vice Minister for Sports Miguel Aguilar said the high-altitude games have become a unifying national cause.

"We are a country they cannot marginalize based on where we live," Aguilar said.

At the Bolivian Institute for the Biology of Altitude, a university-affiliated center, researcher Enrique Vargas says the initial studies have borne out that claim.

In October, the institute tested players from Bolivia and lower-elevation Paraguay, running them on treadmills and measuring oxygen intake and other factors.

The study found that Paraguayan players were able to take in about 10 percent less oxygen than their Bolivian counterparts.

The study also found that Paraguayan players experienced slightly higher pressure on their pulmonary arteries than the Bolivians, though not high enough to place them at risk for pulmonary edema, a deadly condition that produces swelling and fluid buildup in the lungs at high altitude.

"It didn't reach the point of saying, 'Don't play,'" Vargas said.

The Bolivian national team is soldiering on, although it has returned to its familiar low position in South America's qualifying tournament for the 2010 World Cup.

But last month, the Bolivians enjoyed their biggest victory when they trounced front-runner Paraguay 4-2.